Publications

Report on ASC project degradation of organic materials

Lo, Chi S.; Thompson, Aidan P.; Grest, Gary S.

Using molecular dynamics simulations, a constitutive model for the chemical aging of polymer networks was developed. This model incorporates the effects on the stress from the chemical crosslinks and the physical entanglements. The independent network hypothesis has been modified to account for the stress transfer between networks due to crosslinking and scission in strained states. This model was implemented in the finite element code Adagio and validated through comparison with experiment. Stress relaxation data was used to deduce crosslinking history and the resulting history was used to predict permanent set. The permanent set predictions agree quantitatively with experiment.